1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to a three-dimensional (3D) authoring application interface and, more specifically, to multiscale 3D navigation.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computers continue to grow in processing and storage capacity, users create ever larger data sets that include both large structures as well and smaller scale detailed elements. A particularly compelling large multiscale data set is the Earth and the geospatial information of human activity, including global political boundaries, roads, and motorways, and buildings. With the advent of Google Earth™ and Microsoft Virtual Earth™, 3D urban visualization and navigation has become mainstream.
There are several scales at which urban environments can be meaningful to users—those at the city scale, at the neighborhood scale, at the street level scale, at a scale of a single building or home, and at the scale of a single apartment or room inside of a structure. However, typical 3D software applications do not account for the scale of the environment within their navigation tools. Some applications simply do not provide a means for users to modify the navigation tools in the ways needed to support multiscale navigation. Applications that do allow an end user to control navigation tools, typically bury the control options in several layers of dialog boxes. Users need to continuously manually modify the settings as the scale of the environment changes, adding significant effort to the end users task.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a technique for providing users with an adaptive multiscale navigation experience in 3D application programs.